Project Description
DE&S Delivering Change to Drive Excellence
Within a context of increased global threats, DE&S has been changing. The new, improved DE&S will increase outputs for defence, improve availability of key platforms and get essential, innovative and life-saving kit to the front lines faster.
By driving improvements within DE&S and across the defence enterprise, we’ll go faster to outpace our adversaries as threats change. And by harnessing the latest digital technology, we’ll improve our own business operations while accelerating and integrating capabilities for our armed forces and allies.
By empowering our teams to challenge norms, bring in new ideas and innovations we are enhancing the UK’s competitive edge. And by evolving, we can work smarter, drive pace and agility into our systems and cut bureaucracy and waste.
Challenging our ways of working means we are doing more of what really matters to create a more effective and impactful DE&S.
Our new ways of working have already:
- reduced waste
- increased insight across our equipment portfolio to support better, faster and more informed decision making, and
- increased agility, to better focus our resources on Defence’s top priorities.
Typhoon: Total availability of UK combat air defence
The UK’s Typhoon fleet stands ready to protect national interests 24/7, thanks to our innovative TyTAN (Typhoon Total Availability eNterprise) programme.
This successful partnership between DE&S, the RAF and BAE Systems ensures our combat aircraft are available whenever needed, and has driven a 15% increase in availability.
TyTAN has revolutionised how the MOD and industry partners work together, delivering enhanced aircraft availability while optimising costs. The programme provides comprehensive support services, including maintenance, training, technical support and inventory management.
The Typhoon fleet supports seven front-line squadrons across the UK and in overseas locations, with each squadron requiring up to 10 aircraft to be constantly operation ready. This Forward Available Fleet is further supported by dedicated Operational Conversion and Test and Evaluation units.
AI revolutionising maintenance scheduling for the RAF’s Typhoon fleet
Looking to tomorrow, DE&S is pioneering the use of artificial intelligence to transform Typhoon maintenance scheduling. This innovative approach, part of Typhoon’s Maintenance optimisation portfolio, uses Large Language Model technology to adjust maintenance procedures and enhance aircraft availability.
Early results are impressive. The AI system has already identified potential annual maintenance savings of 2,500 hours, with a further 4,000 hours projected in the second phase. While still overseen and checked by expert maintenance engineers, the technology can analyse millions of maintenance records in minutes, achieving over 90% accuracy in identifying maintenance efficiencies.
Through these cutting-edge initiatives, we continue to enhance the combat effectiveness of the UK’s Typhoon fleet, ensuring it remains a cornerstone of national defence capability.
The Typhoon Deputy Force Commander, Group Captain James Heeps, said:
“Operational demands on the Typhoon Force have been consistently high since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, not just in terms of flying hours but also in the number and geographic spread of locations we are required to operate from, reflecting the RAF’s strategic intent to adopt a more agile and resilient approach.
“Considering that our support arrangements were designed and initially contracted when the focus was on efficient delivery from a limited number of well-resourced sites, the fact that Typhoon availability has increased by 15% over the past 18 months despite the significant pressure added by the new operating context speaks volumes for the strong working relationships, mutual understanding, and focus on operational delivery between all three arms of the TyTAN enterprise.”
The power of digital engineering being realised
The Digital Engineering Centre (DEC), established in 2023, exploits digital tools and processes to increase the pace of delivery for our armed forces, and provide solutions for tomorrow.
By working with our allies and partners on proven and novel digital engineering techniques, the DEC helps remove bureaucracy and improve decision making, so capabilities can reach the front line quicker. The DEC works with teams across defence to demonstrate the art of the possible, identifying opportunities and unblocking barriers.
Concept visualisation
By harnessing digital tools like gaming technology, we’ve been able to develop custom virtual environments to test equipment requirements quickly, at minimal cost.
Using real-time 3D platforms, developed by the gaming industry, the DEC developed several custom virtual functioning models within realistic environments. These models allow delivery teams and their customers to interact with conceptual systems, helping them to determine what works and what doesn’t, months or years before real-life evaluation would be possible.
This technology can significantly reduce uncertainty, highlighting core technical trade-offs. For one project team it meant accelerating a decision point from three years to five weeks.
Ben Wood, Head of Digital Engineering Centre, said:
“The primary focus of the DEC is to reduce the time it takes to meet the needs of our war fighters. This example clearly demonstrates the benefits the DEC can bring in speeding up the acquisition processes across Defence.”
New tech into the hands of our armed forces faster
Technological changes accelerate during wartime which is why we need to ensure we can move just as quickly. This can be seen happening in real-time as the war in Ukraine continues.
Our Future Capability Innovation (FCI) team is leveraging the lessons learned from this conflict to drive new ways of working for capability acceleration and prototype warfare.
FCI is shifting from projects where we consider if new capabilities are worth investing in (what the MOD calls ‘pre-concept’ projects), towards rapidly exploring new ideas and accelerating them to exploitation or moving concepts into operational prototypes to be used in real environments.
In some circumstances FCI also ‘fails fast’ and moves on to other more promising solutions if capabilities end up being not technically feasible, affordable or desirable by the users.
James Gavin, Head of the FCI team, said:
“We’re learning lessons from a war underway today, to change the way we equip our armed forces – making us quicker to test and adopt new technology to sustain our advantage – so the UK and its allies can stay ahead of its adversaries.”
Product Development Model
As well as this fresh focus on Capability Accelerators and Prototype Warfare, the team is employing new ways of working including the proven 3-2-1 product development model.
In this, FCI sets an outcome-focused capability ask to industry, receives competitive bids, then funds the best three to a minimal viable product. These are then assessed, taking the best two to minimum viable deployable capability, and then the best capability to scale and undergo further spiral development.
By using this rapid tendering and delivery model FCI have been able to progress a number of projects, including One Way Attack Drones, developed across several months instead of years with less MOD people and funding.
While this work has been for the Ukraine so far, work on new projects using variants of this model for our own armed forces has already begun.
Find out more about what we do at DE&S.
Defence Experts Delivering for the Nation
DE&S helps our armed forces protect the nation, our territories and our allies. Few other organisations have a higher collective purpose. It’s this purpose that drives our experts to deliver every day, making sure the soldiers, sailors and aviators serving our country have what they need to succeed.
Partnering with industry for prosperity
Our commitment extends beyond delivering world-class equipment and support to the UK Armed Forces; we are dedicated to supporting UK economic growth, driving exports, championing sustainability and creating social value across our operations and the contracts we place with industry.
